Online stores have co-existed with physical (so called “bricks and mortar”) stores for many years. There have been previous attempts to integrate the online shopping experience with bricks and mortar shopping. For example, some stores allow shoppers to make purchases online for later pickup at a physical location. Some stores allow shoppers to search their online sites for nearby locations at which a particular item is available for purchase. Some stores even allow customers to filter a search of an online site based on the availability of the items at a particular physical location.
However, despite these previous attempts, the integration of online and bricks and mortar stores has never been seamless. In the prior art, a customer making an online purchase for later pickup must make a specific effort to perform both the purchasing and the picking up of the item, with little benefit that could not be gained by merely going to the physical store and buying the item there. The online databases of product availability are often inaccurate, saying that an item is present when it is either out of stock (e.g., due to inaccurate inventories, theft, and the like) or misplaced within the store. The customer has no convenient way of determining the accuracy of the information without going to the store or calling the store and hoping that the store employees will be willing to do a physical search.